Kentucky has a beat-up quarterback and a three-game losing streak entering its bye week, and coach Mark Stoops said that time off comes at a good time as the Wildcats look to hit the “reset button.”

After Sawyer Smith absorbed another tough hit, UK went with Lynn Bowden at quarterback, a move Stoops admitted should have happened earlier. Without going into detail, Stoops said the team has great respect for Smith battling through two injuries.

Here’s a sampling of what Stoops told the media after the 24-7 loss at South Carolina:

  • We need to hit the reset button and get some guys healthy and get some of these mistakes we’re making corrected.
  • There’s a lot of things that we can get fixed and will and we got to continue to have a great bye week and try to get some young guys cleaned up and more detail and better in all areas.
  • Rough day offensively. Sawyer is giving us everything he can. He’s banged up. That’s the bottom line. We don’t need to make excuses, there are no excuses. We all need to do a better job and we’ve got to get some guys healthy. Maybe should have went to Lynn maybe earlier. I know everybody’s going to ask that, I don’t know, it’s worth a shot because we certainly did struggle moving the football and Sawyer has to heal up and hopefully he will. Got to get some things checked out here on this bye
  • We have confidence in Walker (Wood). Walker’s gone through a lot of injuries and it’s going to be tough on any option at that point.
  • Kavosiey Smoke had a head injury that was told to me that it was a migraine.
  • We’re scrapping and clawing to find some stops. The guys are playing hard and we’re not real precise on some of the run fits and some of the things that are going on. We’ve got to get that fixed. The guys are playing, they’re fighting their way through this experience, and by playing and seeing things and things move and they need to continue to learn and get better. I do think that the secondary’s fighting hard and competing and wanting to get better, all of them are.
  • I still love this team and these guys are going to fight. We’re in the midst of a tough stretch right here. We need the bye. We got to get healthy and we’ve got to hit the reset button and go back and fight our way out of this. There’s only one way to do that. We’ll do it. We’ve been in worse situations before. We’ll continue to stick together and get better and find options. So that’s all you can do.